A new job… and we’re hiring!

I’m happy to report that I’ve recently joined a new team at Microsoft: John Montgomery‘s “Non-Professional Tools” team. We’re still in startup mode… it’s just the two of us right now, but more folks are joining soon and we’re looking to hire many more!

Our team’s charter is basically to make programming fun, rewarding and cool for hobbyist/student developers. So whether you’re a good fit for program management, development, test, or being my manager (along with several other developers and test developers), send me your resume if you’re interested! Here’s a description from the current twopostings I found at the Microsoft jobs site:

Have you ever imagined a “Live” development experience? Do you want to help build one? Did you know that there are over 25M software enthusiasts and students, while there are only 7M professional developers? Did you also know that we really have not tapped into the 25M market? Come explore the possibilities with us on the Tuscany startup team.

The “Tuscany” team is responsible for creating the next-generation experience for enthusiast and hobbyist developers. Our goal is to create a wave of enthusiasts who love building experiences with Microsoft software and services by making it fun, rewarding and cool to create these experiences. We’re exploring some very non-traditional -some might say heretical- methods to achieve this goal, not the least of which is to create a “Live” development experience and to hit a ship cycle that has us introducing new functionality in weeks and months instead of years.

Good to see Microsoft do something other than chase Google/Yahoo’s tails or rest on Windows/Office laurels. This, like the earlier Robotics announcement, is good news. Hope they get the PR attention they deserve.

This is such a great idea and I wish you every success with it. Between this and Project Glidepath it really seems like Microsoft is looking after the wider developer ecosphere.

Any platform lives or dies on how much new content ("applications") gets generated and since it’s much easier to trust and feel good about running managed code written by someone you don’t know then hopefully we’ll see a new wave of must-have micro apps.

Congratulations with the new job. It seems like a promising idea. Knowing that you decide to join Tuscany team, it is a clear sign for me that I must keep an eye on this project.

However, It always affraid me when I discover a project with absurdly grandiose goals. Something like "fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers" is a typical characteristics of black hole project as described by Microsoft’s Paul Vick in December 2004 on his blog(http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/12/01/2598.aspx). Adam, please convince me that "tuscany" will not end up like so many other black hole projects like WinFS or Object File System (OFS).